Replaying racism

I recently was drawn (backwards, kicking & screaming) into a debate about the movie "Avatar." My response to the film when it came out is here. It has been a few months (ok, several) and this year has been incredibly busy to boot, that I found myself struggling to recall the specific prompts that had made me respond the way I did, and why I consider the film racist. I was also holding back my tongue while speaking to members of my soon-to-be husband's extended family, not wanting to fight with them. My interlocutor told me he didn't see why the movie was racist, and that he left the film with a message of peace and better understanding between peoples.

The next day while watching tv I saw "Scandalize My Name," a film about the ways that McCarthyism wrought havoc on the black community and was often used as a justification for not supporting civil rights for all. Because communism supported rights for all, many civil rights advocates were dismissed as communists. One of the commentators said, "Racism is most dangerous when it is invisible."



That was it. That was exactly what I had been groping for in my argument over "Avatar." The film cloaks its racism so insidiously, allowing the "natives" to win but portraying them in degrading ways, always nature lovers, without science or technology, wearing simple clothing associated with barbarism or caveman style (loincloths, anyone?) and lacking the means to function in the modern world. They inevitably are ruled or dominated by someone from a more "sophisticated" world, a white militarized capitalist world, who infiltrates their community, learns their ways, and then leads them to victory (which they could not achieve on their own). Most insultingly, at the end of the film, the main character ATTAINS indigeneity, rendering it a commodity that can be won by the white man. The "secret ways", the indigenous identity, can be explored, discovered, and its secrets opened to a person who can become indigenous. All of these tired tropes and stereotypes abound in "Avatar," but they are carefully hidden and concealed so most walk out of the theater without realizing that yes, yet again, native peoples are being represented as backwards, timeless, nature lovers, unmodern, etc...and these tropes internalized by new, younger audiences who will then regurgitate them. This is unacceptable. Racism is dangerous, but fatal and insidious when it is invisible. That is truly frightening. We as audiences cannot be afraid to peal back the layers of the image to unfold the meaning within, and speak out against it.


I find it troubling that children and adults alike are watching this film and internalizing these stereotypes. Writing more blog posts is unlikely to change the world...but I must use my voice however I can to speak out against this continued exploitation and representation.

Snowout in Brooklyn

Got back from Christmas in Vermont to find Brooklyn under piles and piles of snow...storm came through on Sunday. It's Wednesday night, and we still have very limited mobility and services in the outer boroughs. Check out this great capture of the blizzard from Mike Black:

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

Here's the fallout (falldown?) from the storm as of Wednesday around noon, 12/29/2010 here in South Brooklyn.

Sunset Park - Snowout 12.29.10 from beth harrington on Vimeo.

some more...

Sunset Park 2 - Snowout, as of 12.29.10 from beth harrington on Vimeo.

(Please excuse the audio - I did not edit)

I also did some videos in Park Slope, Red Hook, and Bay Ridge which I will post later. Whole streets remain blocked and impassable with snow. Bloomberg has promised all streets will be cleared by tomorrow morning. Here in Sunset Park, we aren't holding our breath.

Mathaf opens in Doha

Contemporary Arab Art: Walid Raad

This is amazing.

Go to the Atlas Group's website, and pick Archive > A > Raad.




Raad placed colored dots over the bullet marks in buildings and the urban environment in Lebanon in the 80s, based on the tracemarks of the bullets which often etched various colors into the buildings.

He realized later that the color of the bullets corresponded to their country of origin, and he had created an archive of the countries that sold ammunition during the war.

More soon - on Raad, whose work has been a joyful discovery.
So much to do, so much to prove, so little time.

Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look.
Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil.


To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons.

This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs.


The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people.


Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.

On transcendence - in fond memory of Father Rog

When I first started looking at colleges, my mother was very nervous. She was going to be living on another continent, and I was going back to "the States" for school. Her first-born baby was going to be gone, far from where she could fix things, put band-aids on cuts, brew tea, listen to worries. Her anxiety for me was palpable.

We visited Seattle University the summer between my junior and senior year. I met with admissions staff and professors. Three weeks later, in Germany, I got a note thanking me for my visit. Handwritten. And when I got my acceptance letter the next spring, the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences wrote a message on my acceptance: "Thanks for your statement. Given your interests, you would enjoy Frances Mayes' A Year in Provence." The dean wrote to me. My mom loved that the Jesuits needed two PhDs to teach, that the community was small and tight-knit, that SU seemed to care about its students personally. I wouldn't be just a number at SU.

And I wasn't. I am profoundly thankful for my formative 4 years at SU.

I wasn't a number because of the incredible SU faculty and staff, including Father Roger Gillis. Father Rog was really involved with Search, but accessible to everyone on campus, always ready with a smile and a kind word.


(photo from the Spectator)

This afternoon, Father Rog passed away. He had been battling cancer for several months. The Jesuits started a Facebook page, whose members swelled quickly, and the wall immediately filled with kind notes and memories and pictures of Father Rog dancing.

There are amazing individuals in history who have big names and who we can all think of when we think of grace, acceptance, love, faith...Father Rog lived this. Every day. For years - not just the years that I was at SU. The notes on his Facebook wall, this groundswell of love and gratitude, dates back before my time and continued in the years after my graduation. He shared this grace with his students, so fully, so openly - it did not matter if you were lost, found, Christian, atheist, tall, short... It was the first time that I was in a community of religious people and did not feel pressure to convert or join. Nor did I feel judged. Father Rog accepted us as we were, loved us in our brokenness and our wholeness.

I look up to figureheads like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, but it is because of Father Rog that I understand them as real people and believe that this kind of transcendent beauty and grace is attainable. It is possible to live with grace and radiate love. He did it.

So, it is our loss, but he filled us with a joy for life that we should cherish and share.

Rest in peace, Father Rog.

On the Road: the Cultural Heritage Tour of Southeast Asia

2-28-08
from Bangkok, Thailand

I am at the end of my second day here in Bangkok, and it has definitely been an education. I am exhausted but full of delicious Thai food and completely ready for bed...in the Massage Parlor King's hotel.

What?

Our troubles at the Davis started yesterday when Kecia, who had requested a nonsmoking room, was assigned a smoking one. I’m not entirely sure how the desk clerk didn’t see this coming; if he had any discerning capacities he’d have understood from her long, unbound hair, her organic-textile skirt, and the beads bejeweling her neck, ears and fingers that she’s not the kind of woman who smokes. In fact, she’s the kind of woman who walks around barefoot to “feel the earth,” eats seaweed, and uses nontraditional grains in her bizarre salads. She doesn’t even have a chair in her office; she uses a burgundy inflatable ball. A smoking room is something she didn't take lying down. Picture a righteous yogic anger compounded by transoceanic jet lag, and you’ll arrive at something akin to the clerk’s experience.

While we waited for the scurrying clerk to rectify Kecia’s room situation, we went to collect our "welcome drink" at the hotel bar. When we requested wine (necessary to dull the edge of the jet lag), we were informed that the welcome drink was 7-Up only. Rolling our eyes, we ordered a wine chaser with our 7-Up. We were quietly sipping our purchased wine when out of nowhere, two scantily clad Thai ladies clambered aboard a makeshift stage in their knee-high leather boots and proceeded to sing cheesy pop songs into microphones, about two feet behind us. All signs indicated that a restful trip to Bangkok wasn’t in the stars for us.

Then today the bombshell dropped.

Yes. We discovered today that the owner & designer of our hotel, Chuvit Davis, is a notorious character around Bangkok. He made a fortune on massage parlors, which he then parlayed into a massive hotel complex (that mistakenly brands itself as a boutique hotel - it is certainly not). While I can make no comment about his political qualifications, the hotel décor is a hideous, sour version of the W hotel meets traditional Thai decoration. Something about the whole scheme is saccharine, fake, artificial, like you could just peel back the entire wall, the entire hotel suite. But now that I know that I am staying somewhere decorated by the "massage parlor king," everything makes more sense...Every Thai we told where we were staying (including cab drivers) has smirked. Also, Mr. Chuvit is trying to run for public office, on the platform of being a watchdog for Thai decency and morals and culture. Jay told us that he puts huge billboards of himself all over Bangkok. We unwittingly are contributing to his advertising campaign! His marketing campaign for the hotel (which is on free postcards, and the calendar in the room, and everything) is "The Way We Live in the Davis, Bangkok." Living as a madam? Pimp?

Yesterday Kecia and I had gone to Siam Paragon to get cell phones and do some basic shopping, and today we headed over to SPAFA (our partner) to do some workshop business. Our partner Jay is wonderful (she also very kindly informed us the true nature of our hotel owner). She sent us out with her colleague Mo and a driver to do some shopping. We had thought we were being clever by not buying most of our supplies in the US, but instead planning to buy them in BKK. After all, BKK is sophisticated and a business capital of the world.

Not so much a capital of laser printer labels or flipcharts of white paper...our lovely friend Mo did the best she could do, with all five feet of her tiny adorable self leaning over various counters in her sparkly shoes and speaking rapid-fire Thai accompanied to hand motions ("big paper" "flip" "stick" "divide") but to no avail. We were met only with blank looks, not blank paper, and squiggly eyebrows. We are label-less, and our flipchart will be man-made. As in, large pieces of paper that we literally clip together. First class all the way, Getty.

As we drove the streets of Dusit and Phra Athit (n. Bangkok), we noted that many Thais were wearing black and white. I remembered from my visit last year that many Thais wore yellow polos with the royal crest on them. The Thais love them some king. Mo explained that the black and white is for mourning, and for 100 days. The King's sister, a beloved princess, passed away earlier this year, and there has been ordained 100 days of mourning, during which all government employees are required to wear black and white (for the rest of the population, it is merely a recommendation). The Royal Garden outside Wat Pra Keow is now a mourning ground, where mourners come to the royal palace to pay their respects to the princess. There are buses of students and country folk who come in, as well. It is difficult for me to imagine something similar in the US for a political figure or ruler - I cannot imagine us wearing black and white for 100 days as a nation to commemorate anyone...

Mo also told us as we passed the ministry of defense that originally all the canons decorating the carefully manicured lawn had been pointing out towards the street - and across the street at the Royal Palace. A few years ago, someone made a stink about it, saying it was inappropriate for even decorative canons to be hinting at firing at the King, so in the middle of the night the canons were turned, and now face north and south instead of west towards the palace. The idea of an army of tiny Thais grunting to turn canons 90 degrees in another direction in the middle of the night is hilarious to me.

Tonight, after braving an hour of traffic to at rush hour to cross the town from SPAFA to return to our hotel, Kecia and I stopped to have dinner at the Lemongrass restaurant, near the Emporium mall. It was amazing - we had a dish that was eggplant, yellow bean, and peanut, pomelo salad (well, Kecia did - I don't eat shrimp), and the spiciest green curry ever. Our waiter didn't tell us it was spicy - perhaps because Kecia is Asian he thought we were able to handle it? No. I thought my lips were actually burning off.


Now, I'm back in my hotel to finish up a few loose ends for the workshop while I watch Chinese MTV. (I know! I didn't know they were allowed to have MTV). The music here is so amazing - Kecia keeps making fun of me for knowing all the pop songs in malls, taxis, and lobbies - hey, a girl's gotta have some Backstreet Boys knowledge if she lived in Europe in the 90s, right? My choices are Chinese MTV and something called the Australia Network, which, when I watched ten minutes yesterday, was an instructional video on how to casually invite people to hang out with you, and featured a 50-something gentleman repeating phrases slowly and with subtitles. "Would you like to join us? It would be great if you could join us. Do you want to join us?" Since I already speak English I didn't find it super helpful, but it was interesting to see Western manners of hospitality reflected, detached from their standard cultural context.

Anyhow, meetings with UNESCO tomorrow, probably more shopping for things we won't find, and then finally some relief on the weekend - shopping at Jatujak, Wat Pho, massages. And hopefully more 3-flavor mangos to dip in chili sugar!

LandFlow

"My usual question, unanswered by these - by most - travel books, is, How did you get there? We have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus?...Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? ... What interest me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as trains run."
-Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

Inspired by Theroux, I recorded pieces of my train journey from Los Angeles to San Diego, to see how the land changes, how the terrain slowly evolves, in an attempt to capture and explore the feelings of movement through different spaces, of train travel, of crossing the earth and noticing the spaces that shift along the way. Our train passed from one urban configuration (flat, diffuse, with small clusters of small buildings and a certain reputation of openness, possibility) to another urban configuration (walkable, not as extensive, with a more conservative reputation) through urban sprawl, small rural towns, and natural settings. I am intrigued by the meanings and sensory experiences of these different spaces in passing through them, and how they are woven together on the fabric of the land in a seamless way.

From the Road: One Time in Bangkok

I’m coming up on a year of blogging, and looking back and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. When I initially started, I wanted to use the blog as a way to share my writing, both creative and academic. As life sort of happened (Lennon’s famous note about life happening while you’re busy making other plans, anyone?), I felt the pressure to blog and post but I want my posts to be worth reading rather than just numerous. As a result, I’ve started to edit some older pieces…so, here we go. I am now fairly critical of my early travelogues, as I don’t want to essentialize or exoticize the places I have been and the people I have met, but to share my experiences in an honest way. Let me know what you think.
April 2007
From Bangkok, Thailand, and Phnom Penh/Siem Reap, Cambodia

"This is my first time in Bangkok. When I landed and got in the car to drive through the brightly lit streets of Bangkok after midnight, I felt like this was so different from anywhere I’d ever been: Eastern, Western Europe – Turkey – Russia, I was wide awake. I was excited to see a part of the world I’d never seen before, and to visit my friend who was working on his Fulbright.
Hong lives on "Little Arabia Street" in Bangkok, so I was surprised to be able to read something (it is incredibly disorienting to lose your literacy). It was a last taste of something familiar, before a lot of unfamiliar. We toured Bangkok under Hong's brisk knowledge of every method of public transportation (including river ferries!) We visited Wat Arun, the temple of the Dawn, one of the oldest temples in Bangkok, as well as making it up to the Chatuchak market in the north of the city (where Thais shop). For most of the day, we didn't see many tourists or white people; because Hong had learned Thai, our experience was so different. We were off the beaten tourist track, and visiting spaces that were the spaces of Bangkok residents, not visitors. The next day, when we went to the famous backpacker's Khao San Road, we found them....all of tourists! I overheard backpackers talking about where to get the cheapest food, fighting to get 3 scarves for $5 instead of $2, arguing down to pennies with the Thai. Many of these tourists come to Bangkok and stay on Khao San Road, dealing with English-speaking Thais in the hospitality industry, meeting and hanging out with other white tourists (Australian, Kiwi, Brit, Canadian), drinking cheap Tiger beer and exchanging stories about where to get the “best” authentic street food or pashminas. In a way, there is a village of international tourists within the city of Bangkok, and they barely overlap. One is a village of long cotton skirts, dreads and braids, textile bags, and bragging about how long they’ve been off the grid; the other is a bustling, vibrant city, with incredible smells and tastes and people trying to make their way.


We also were surrounded by international tourists at the Vertigo bar at the Banyan Tree Hotel. Bangkok has a mix of very poor areas and very wealthy areas - there is a slum behind Hong's fingerprint-entry, 2-security-guard-patrolled apartment; there are food stalls where you can get meatball skewers, chili dipping sauce, and some mango slices for $1 and rooftop bars like the Vertigo (62nd floor!) where you can pay $10 for a (watered-down, if I may say so) martini. The Vertigo was amazing - to see all of Bangkok spread out at your feet at night, all lit up, the bridges over the Chao Phraya - it was breathtaking under a crescent moon (it was still 100 degrees at 10pm though).
We woke up early on Monday morning to make our flight to Phnom Penh, where we spent 3 days. Hong still has family there who stayed during the Khmer Rouge and subsequent Vietnamese communist occupation, so we got to meet his grandmother, aunt, and some random family members. After Bangkok, Phnom Penh seemed quiet. BKK has skyscrapers, it’s vertical, it’s buzzing with cars and activity and lights; Phnom Penh has no buildings (that I saw) over 5 stories and few "positive" tourist attractions. There is a Golden Palace and a Silver Pagoda, as well as Wat Phnom, but none are distinctive or historically significant enough to attract tourists en masse. What Phnom Penh does have is genocide - the Killing Fields, about 15 km from the city, and the S-21 Prison of the Khmer Rouge, now a museum. Somehow this sense of loss permeates the city. We visited both of these places, first taking our tuktuk out to the Killing Fields. It was incredibly difficult to see, because several placards clearly stated what each part of the field was used for ("Here a loudspeaker was hung to drown the sounds of the dying", "Here is the tree they flung the babies against", etc). There was no sugar-coating, no careful wording, no sanitized history. Also, only 4 of 20-something mass graves have been excavated...like the concentration camps of Germany, death hangs in this place, sitting in the humid air, stirring in the trees, pressing down from the sky. Afterwards, we sat quietly, our words sucked out of us, rattling along in our tuktuk as we drove through the outskirts of Cambodia’s capital city to go to the S-21 Museum. We hired a guide, who had herself lost members of her immediate family to the Khmer Rouge. She told us that none of the Khmer Rouge had stood trial for their crimes, and that many of them had come out of the jungle in the early 80s to take back power from the Vietnamese Communists...she said, "I do not want revenge, I want to move forward." Fellow traveler and Fulbright Sarah wondered if this was because Cambodians believed in karma - I want to be understanding and culturally sensitive, but it made me angry and sad to know that a quarter of the population of Cambodia was killed and that (my Western ideal of) justice would never be served...that someone got away with killing a quarter of his own people and making refugees out of another quarter of the population...and it scared me to think how close I came to never knowing Hong. His family survived the Khmer Rouge to live in Vietnamese labor camps, from which they escaped over the border at night into Thailand, and from there sought asylum in the United States. How many Hongs will the world never know? And in these circumstances, what is justice, and who has the right to ask for it? If a society holds other ideas of justice than “an eye for an eye,” do outsiders have the right to push for a different iteration of justice? Is there something to be learned from a desire to move forward, rather than holding accountabilities from the past?


That day was really heavy, and after our trek through Cambodia's darkest chapter, we met up with Hong's aunt for dinner. A sharp negotiator, she paid a few dollars for all 6 of us to pile onto a belabored tuktuk and headed across town to eat dinner in an alley cafe. An empty garage-like room, cruelly lit with fluorescent tubes, long picnic tables in plastic tablecloth had Bunsen burners with soup broth and meatballs cooking. The waitresses brought us bowls of noodles, pork crackling, vegetables, and more meat - we were literally to make our own soup. It was really good - but hot sitting on the updraft of the burner! Hong sat in the middle, with his family speaking Khmer and his English speaking friends waiting patiently for his back-and-forth translations! Hong's uncle (we think) kept toasting us, so, after my time in Cambodia, the only real Khmer word I know is "Swa-khum!" and I hope that means “Cheers.”


On Wednesday, we went for luscious breakfast crepes, topped with dazzling fresh fruit, down the street, dropped off Sarah at her volunteering gig, and then Hong, Razz, Jeremy and I rented a driver from our hotel to drive us up to Siem Reap, a four-hour drive through the jungle next to the Tonle Sap lake that marks the heart of Cambodia. It was a beautiful drive, allowing us to see much of the countryside we otherwise would not have seen. Most of the houses were built on stilts, because the Tonle Sap floods, but in the hot/dry season, the Khmers were relaxing during the day's heat in hammocks strung up between the stilts of their homes. We whizzed through the countryside in our black Mercedes (now, when I say Mercedes, I mean, the most broken down, seats-caving-toward-the center, pleather-seated, A/C "works" style car with a Mercedes doohickey on the hood you've ever seen), and stopped for a lunch break at a beautiful open-air restaurant built over the Tonle Sap. Here we had a chance to relax in the hammocks as we waited for our food, and overlook the lake with its fishermen and water lillies.
It was really beautiful, and after eating we relaxed in the hammocks over the lake, but the road was calling us north. We got to Siem Reap at 4pm or so, and checked into our hotel, the Golden Banana (of much fame at my job...apparently no one else at a commercial real estate firm would think of staying at a gay-friendly hotel in the jungle called the Golden Banana!). It was an oasis, with a POOL! I averaged 4 showers a day in Southeast Asia, because it is SO hot and sticky and it is hard to feel clean when you have only a certain number of clothes in your bag and the weather is that hot. So I nearly got on my knees in thanks to see a pool. We freshened up, and then Hong, Razz and I went to the Angkor Mondiale hotel for dinner and a performance by some Apsara dancers. These women were incredible - wearing these intense and detailed costumes, and then standing almost still, moving only their hands and fingers in these complex and joint-defying movements! Afterwards, we went back to the pool and dove in to cool off before bed. We ended up hitting the sack fairly early so we could wake up and be at Angkor by 7am.
Angkor, oh Angkor...long on my list of places I have to see before I die, I still wasn't prepared for its beauty. It was such a contrast to see Cambodia's darkest past, and then two days later, to see Khmer civilization's pinnacle of accomplishment! Our tuktuk drove us to the gate, where foreigners pay $20/day to get in (there is no entry restriction for Cambodians, who literally drive right past the toll booth), and then we drove up to the first temple, Angkor Wat. Angkor itself is a 400-km park, with so many temples you could buy a week-long pass and still not see them all. A bunch of Khmer kings decided to build temples up there, so there are at least 20 "big" temples, and more yet undiscovered in the jungle. We came around the side of Angkor, next to the moat, and I couldn't believe it....Angkor is stunning in its size. The outer wall, inside the moat, is imposing...and then you walk through the gate (careful not to step on the monkeys, though) and all of a sudden you see the classic view of Angkor, with the beehive towers...and the sun is rising behind it. And even if you think you're going to get through it just fine, you find your breath catching in your throat and maybe (if you're like me) you tear up. It is incredible to me that this amazing temple has survived reigns both Hindu and Buddhist, has survived 1000 years of life in the jungle, survived the Khmer Rouge's plundering of Cambodia’s cultural heritage...and as Phnom Penh is haunted by its terrible past, in a way that the visitor can feel palpably, Angkor Wat overwhelms, it gives you goosebumps. You feel profoundly, immediately, that you are on holy ground, and that changes how you come to these temples. There is a quieting, a calming – you feel yourself small in comparison to this magnificent, enormous and imposing temple complex that has outlasted so much.
We walked up into the heart of the temple and climbed up into the central tower. This may sound easy, but it is not for the faint of heart (the American idea of “sue them if you get hurt” does not apply here; the safety industry hasn’t quite taken off). The stairs up to the central tower are tiny, half-stairs; the top half of my foot only fit on a stair at once. These steps are not built for fat white tourists who eat Big Macs. Or for wussy little girls who are afraid of heights! I admit I had a rough time coming down - looking at giant flat rocks just waiting for me pancake myself was a bit intimidating. But the view from the top was worth the climb...you can look out over the jungle, and see the perfect symmetry of the temple. There are several Buddhas up there (it is completely unfathomable how those ponderous Buddhas got up there, just from a physics perspective, and Angkor Wat was constructed as a Hindu temple, as the Hindu bas-reliefs on the outer walls attest, from an ideological perspective). Attending the Buddhas were several monks, who seemed to have no trouble on the stairs (the key is a sideways walk, it seems).
On our way out, after about 3 hours, we saw a group of monks removing a tree from one of the reflecting pools outside the temple. It seemed incongruous to see a monk wielding a buzz saw, dismembering a tree! Perhaps because the act was so destructive, but I admit trouble reconciling priests with modern tools, like chain saws.
We then got back on our tuktuk and headed up to the temple of Bayon, with all its faces staring ominously into the forest...smaller, and in a bit more disarray than Angkor Wat, but still beautiful...and then lunch and Ta Prohm, the "Tomb Raider" temple, and one of the few that has been completely abandoned to nature...so you climb over tree trunks and vines and giant fallen stones. The jungle seems to be slowly encroaching on the temple, but that just renders it more beautiful. There is no "path", so you carefully pick your own. I felt like an intruder, and worried about tourists coming to deface the temples or destroy them with their shoes, boots, knives, breath. As I gingerly picked my way through the cluttered maze of stones and trees, I entered into a doorway and blinked my eyes in the darkness. An old Buddhist nun came into view, and then a seated Buddha, and some lit incense sticks...she grabbed my arm and said a prayer over me, and tied a red bracelet on me. I couldn't help but smile; her smile as she tied my bracelet on was so encouraging, generous.
After Angkor, we prepared to return to Thailand. Friday saw us get on a plane and head back to Bangkok, where we hit the Southern Bus Terminal (Hong's "You have to do a bus trip if you come to SE Asia; it's required" echoing in our ears) and hopped a $4, 1st-class bus trip out to Hua Hin, a beach resort town. Perhaps because I hadn't gotten sick yet and it was inevitable or perhaps because we had the foolish idea to eat dinner in an American restaurant, both Razz and I got horribly sick, to the dismay of Hong, who shared our hotel room. I spent my final day in Thailand curled up in our hotel room, under the gently blowing (read: intermittently functional) A/C and watching Thai pop music and Al-Jazeera Asia. Another bus trip back to Bangkok, a quick shower and the final cramming of the bags, and I was back at Suwarnapum Airport, headed home."

Mythologizing the West

From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

Contemporary Arab Art: Zineb Sedira

Silent Sight, 2001 from zsedira on Vimeo.

ZINEB SEDIRA
Lately I’ve been working on a number of academic projects in addition to my job, and that has kept me from updating the blog. Rather than remain radio silent, I thought I’d share a snippet of the presentation I’ve been working on for the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference, which focuses on representations of the veil in contemporary art from the Middle East.

The photography and video installations of Zineb Sedira often focus on identity politics. Sedira has used her work to explore questions of belonging and ancestry; she was born in France to Algerian parents, and later moved to Britain. Her earlier work tended more toward the autobiographical, examining family dynamics, with more recent work focusing on the geographies and landscapes of identity politics. Silent Sight, 2000, is a video installation where the camera brackets a woman’s eyes, and a thin wisp of the Algerian haik (veil), so that they inhabit the entire field of view. The woman’s eyes blink, and look to the left and right, towards the frame of the white haik; the viewer immediately focuses on the woman’s eyes and the haik blends into the background. As “Veil” curators Bailey and Tawadros remark, “Here it is the woman’s gaze and the control of her own gaze that takes precedence, while the veil dissolves into a white haze.” Thus, the veil becomes invisible, not a hindrance or restriction upon the woman, and exists as one chosen element of a multifaceted identity as the viewers examine body language. Here the veil doesn’t cover but instead clarifies and focuses attention on the body (at least parts of it); and this focus is not directed to a gender-specific anatomy. The audio accompaniment to the video recounts this experience of limited visibility due to the veil from another perspective; the narrator, as a child, “struggling to interpret her mother’s feelings from beneath her haik. The spectator, who only has access to Sedira’s voice and eyes, is encouraged to replicate the process of establishing trust within a limited visual field.” The narrator recounts an experience from childhood when she failed to recognize her mother because the haik obscured her mother beyond recognition. Here the audio and the video reveal two separate and distinct subjectivities: critic Rachel Epp Buller describes, “The soundtrack plays on the emotion of this moment: sometimes Sedira’s voice shakes, or becomes strained or unclear...This random rhythm – eyes opening, blinking, then closing – matches the moments of silence and speech, white it is the gaze, fixed or lowered, that keeps us in the time frame of the video and in the present tense of its duration.” The narrator comments that she finally accepted the veil was her mother’s “home,” invoking images of domesticity and an almost Victorian “angel-in-the-house” perspective. Instead of unilaterally supporting this assertion, however, the young daughter’s inability to connect to her mother because of the veil could be read as the veil preventing feminine roles (that of motherhood) while simultaneously playing into them (socially respectable veiled woman). Critically, however, the important intervention made here is to reconcile two potentially opposing viewpoints (for and against the veil). The veil is not a symbol of feminine submission, or a backwards, “uncivilized” woman; it does not render a woman invisible, but acutely visible. In a single physical experience, the viewer’s senses recount different stories: the audio portion gently presents a story of frustration, difficulty and isolation in a relationship because of the veil whereas the visual portion affirms the agency and power that veiling can afford. The viewer’s senses are split and yet dually embodied.

Sedira also explores the veil, and the question of anonymity and visibility, again in her photographic installation Don’t Do To Her What You Did To Me, No. 2, 1996 (above). This series of photographs shows Sedira in varied stages of veiling and unveiling, thus making the act of veiling visible and demystified, stripping it of mystery. Epp Buller further comments, “Using herself as the photographic subject, Sedira asserts through her series the individual identities of women despite their veils, which in turn combats Western mythologies about veiled women. As the artist herself asserts, ‘The unveiled woman is seen as an individual and civilized subject, a far cry from the over-represented and culturally constructed veiled woman, who is considered anonymous, passive, and exotic.’” In this installation, Sedira shows a woman in various states of veiling, performing multiple identities simultaneously, and thus breaking the dichotomy. Sedira has developed the metaphor of “veiling-the-mind” as she produced work questioning and probing the veil. This metaphor, she writes, explains “the (mis)reading of cultural signs; to counteract the Western view of veiling, I try not to resort to the literal veil in my artistic practice. Instead I refer to veiling-the-mind in order to explore the multiple forms of veiling in both Western and Muslim cultures.” Sedira uses her work as a space to explore and expand the definition of the veil, rendering it more catholic and philosophical and moving it to a mental, rather than physical, plane.

Sedira also plays on the veil in another religious background. Sedira photographs herself wearing a haik in her Self-Portraits or the Virgin Mary series, 2000 (above). The title of the work blurs the Algerian haik with Christian veils, calling attention to the historic similarities in veiling practices between Christianity and Islam; it also highlights the sexualized nature of women’s bodies as religious saints, and perhaps alluding to the way women artists are similarly singled out for their gender. In this series, the veiled woman is visible, but barely; the photographs contain little contrast between the background the subject, the whiteness at once suggesting an ethereal invisibility, transparency, but also absence. Thus, Sedira employs a color that is the sum of all colors, with no discernible competition between different strains of light, hinting towards a synthesized, pluralistic approach; simultaneously, white references a disturbing colonial history and is evocative of absence, loss and invisibility.
Commenting on her own work, Sedira writes, “At first sight, my artistic practice refers to the veil as a visual motif. But the veil is never purely a physical code, delineated and present; it is also a transparent and subtle mental code.” Here Sedira encourages the viewer to think of the veil as a subjective mental idea, unique to each wearer. She also notes in her catalog essay for “Veil:”

“The visual art in “Veil” has many readings, but I wish to foreground that of transgression. All the artists in this project communicate the personal and the collective, with photography, video, words, installations, and sound as their media of expression and inscription. My ambition for such a dialogue was, and still remains, the need for a critique that enables a renewed lexicon with which to articulate the complexities and subtleties - the ambiguities and contradictions, the generalities and specificities, the similarities and differences - of veiling...such a lexicon could then speak to and about the paradoxes of the veil.”

Sedira’s work transgresses stereotypes, shattering binaries by weaving them into rich tapestries of plurality and simultaneity. While her work references common assumptions and stereotypes, she toys with them to challenge them rather than submitting to them. Furthermore, Sedira’s work does not play into easy tropes of East/West distinctions. Her work has drawn on loaded imagery of the veil and women in domestic capacities, but the messages underpinning their presentations are complicating rather than essentializing.
-Elizabeth Harrington, 2010


(La maison de ma mere, 2002, above)

For other thoughts on Sedira:
http://homepage.mac.com/kmcspadden/IStudy.html

http://libcom.org/library/documentary-representations-british-european-muslim-women-essay-review

Seeds of a Fruitful Endeavor

Kamala Visweswaran, citing Leila Ahmed, cites women writers' tendency towards metaphors of seasons, growing, and nature. Here I give in to the pull of this tendency, as the turning of the season to autumn has sparked more contemplative reflection.

Fall inherently turns us to thoughts of preservation, to thinking about saving things, plans for harvesting, and the natural cycle of life- things grow, they die, the earth turns again. Loss, quiet, renewal, exuberance and abundance. Watching the leaves turn in my neighborhood in south Brooklyn has shown me visually how fast the fall is flying by and I feel unprepared for the heavy cold season approaching. The air is still brisk, with jackets becoming a necessity only recently - and as this year has tended, the fleeting season hasn't wanted to depart on time. Last week, we had days at 75 degrees that were anachronistic of two months past. I remember the end of February this year, when we were so ready for spring, and looking to March for salvation, and the final week of the month brought a record-breaking blizzard. Perhaps this is the legacy of 2010.

I can see many intersections that come together around questions of saving things: whether it's harvesting and preparing for the winter, saving our country and the upcoming elections, and questions in my job about documentation and preserving in material form the work we do. I have also recently explored the work of professors Fred Myers, Haidy Geismar, and Craig Campbell, who all focus on art and material culture and how it is represented or deployed. And most concretely, my parents are packing up their house in Virginia for a move to Nebraska, sifting through their belongings and making decisions about "what stays and what goes." Sifting and sorting seem to be the order of the season.

The criteria we use in saving things is important, I think - I imagine, perhaps naively, that what we choose to save reveals something about who we are. Collectively, as a nation, but also down to the familial level. Perhaps that's why this natural cycle is so beautiful - it clarifies what is important, what is worth being around, in, keeping. It is sobering to look at friendships, jobs, habits, and belongings and evaluate what is helpful to us, and what can be discarded - getting rid of what is no longer useful does not mean the act of discarding is not painful.

I have read, between Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle & other literatures about the crisis in farming and especially around seeds. Producing heirloom vegetables has become difficult, with corporations like Monsanto putting patents and prohibitions on farmers who have grown similar crops (see Vanity Fair expose here). I came across a local "seed bank" - like a library, but for seeds - a way to keep a record, reproducible if and when needed and desired, to promote and sustain generations of natural diversity. Here is a link to the Hudson Valley Seed Library, folks who are saving the seed legacy of the possibilities for growing plants in our area.

Seeds is a lovely metaphor for fall, the idea of something with explosive and powerful potential locked away underground, that something can look like nothing but then surprise us with its bounty, that the surface doesn't always tell the whole story, challenging us to look - and to dig - more deeply. John Butler wrote a song called "From Little Things Big Things Grow." Here he relates the story of an Australian who fought the government and big interests for his land, sitting in his struggle for 8 years, in a simple environment - waiting for the seeds of justice that he had planted to grow. The song is a great exhortation to plant seeds, however small - but to realize that change takes time, and that everything beautiful, good and true takes time to root, to flower, to reach full glory. It requires patience (not my strong suit), but ... nothing is possible without the seed. So we should plant seeds of hope in our speech, in our everyday lives, in every manner we can, striving for what we believe in, knowing that every small act is potentially the genesis of something deeper, wider, and more vibrantly beautiful than we can possibly imagine.


from The Airlie Center
Warrenton, VA
11.1.2010

Taco Crawl: Experiments in South Brooklyn

Taking a cue from the ever fabulous "pub crawl" or "bar crawl," E and I decided to have a "taco crawl." Sunset Park is full of taco stands, trucks, and restaurants - each with their own flavor or style (cooking traditions from many Mexican states are represented here within a ten block radius) and claim to fame. So we invited some of our favorite friends who also enjoy gustatory delights and exploration to come on the first annual Taco Crawl in Sunset Park.
We began at Tacos Xochimilco, named after an area of Mexico City, south of the city center. Xochimilco (pronounced So-tse-milco in Spanish) means 'a place with flowers' in Nahuatl. We didn't see any flowers, but we did see some great greens: as habitual, our taco odyssey started with green and red salsa.




After some carne asada and al pastor deliciousness, Jahi decided to taste a gordita.
Like a taco pillow, filled with taco delights! Xochimilco had great food, and really spicy salsa, but plan on being there for a minute - worth the wait, but they usually have only one cook and one waitress working. You can find them across from the well-known Tacos Matamoros, at the intersection of 46th and 5th Ave.

After Xochimilco, we headed down to the truck we'd seen often parked outside the Key Foods at Sunset Park. Tacos Bronco - you can find the truck after 8p on 5th Ave at 44th Street. You'll recognize it immediately, because the truck creates a halo of white light into which eager taco-hunters crowd like moths to a flame. The truck is incredibly popular, so they have four guys turning out the goods inside the truck, and two 'handlers' outside it who take orders and pass the steaming plates of luscious tacos to the appropriate consumer. I can't recommend these guys enough - they gave us two free tacos to taste, as well as a cup of soup - they said they didn't recognize us, and thanked us for coming. About ten minutes after we ordered, they began to pass out plates to us. I tried my usual, the enchilada (spicy pork), as well as the al pastor. In a culinary innovative delight, these al pastor tacos - which are cooked with pineapple and thus have a juicy, rather sweet flavor - Tacos Bronco puts chopped fresh pineapple onto the tacos, along with giving you a grilled sweet onion.



Here are foodie friends Chris and Katharine pre-Bronco!

So yummy. And, the sign is correct - each taco a whopping $1.50. Brooklyn is the best.

After Tacos Bronco, it seemed ludicrous to try more tacos, but...we did. Heading down Fifth Avenue, we popped into Tacos California, at 47th and 5th Ave. They have stellar, smoky, melt-in-your-mouth carne asada. They also have creamy, luscious shakes.

This was the only place where the waitstaff only spoke Spanish (the other places showed serious American English influence, unfortunately) but we viewed this (correctly) as a harbinger of the great tastes to come. Our waitress had a great attitude, and helped us order in our fragmented Spanish. So, they get bonus points for her good humor.

By this point, we were averaging about 5 tacos each (you have to taste the different kinds at each place, that's the point!) and were starting to fill up. I remembered that Rico's Tacos has amazing 'tacos arabes' - regular tacos but on a harina-flour tortilla and a special sauce. If I have to describe it in words, it's like a taco fell in love with a falafel sandwich and they made a baby. It's incredible. So we went, attempting the nigh-impossible - but unfortunately Rico's was out of tacos arabes by the time we got there (10pm). Lesson learned: tacos arabes are popular, as is Rico's in general, so get there early! Their "regular" tacos are anything but, by the way - they have amazing, spicy, juicy carne enchilada and al pastor and buche and asada tacos...worth the stop. Find them near the wall mural of a pig smiling, roasting in a pot, and the big tacos sign with the arrow at the intersection of 51st and 5th Ave.

Full, we decided not to get some more tacos, and instead bought some beers and headed back to the apartment to digest. We'll be figuring out sites for next year's crawl, but in the meantime, here are some other places you can go to taste delicious tacos in this neighborhood:

Tacos Matamoros
Downside: lots of us gringos know about this place.
Recommendation: Great tacos al pastor & carne enchilada. They also have margaritas, and delicious nachos. Go on a work day, to avoid the crowds of gringos. The food is a little bit spicier on work days, too...or perhaps that's just the imagination at work.
Located at: 46th and 5th Ave. Look for the neon light that has an outline of the taco and emblazoned with "Hot Taco."

Eclipse Mexican
Lots of flavor, but not real spicy. They have a vegetarian menu, and offer definitely gringo Mexican food. Whereas some of these other places have menus on the window, or a cardboard sign, this is a place that is fully clean and you can take your parents there.
Located at: 4th Avenue and 44th

Happy taco-hunting, my friends!

Experiments in Brooklyn - DiFara Pizza!

Di Fara is a pizza legend. It's the kind of place where the service is unbelievably shitty, and the place so run down you can't even throw out your trash - in short, it's not the cleanest place you've ever eaten. It took us twenty minutes to even figure out how to order, the service was so bad. A standard pie is $28, without toppings - individual slices are $5. It's cash only. They can afford to be rude, though - if you're patient enough to actually wait for the pizza, you're happily surprised. There is a slogan on the wall: "Worth the wait!" It's definitely delicious pizza - recommend going on a weekday afternoon if you don't want to wait.



That being said, the crust was magnificent - thin, fully baked, lightly crispy, but not overdone. The cheese was melted, mostly, except for the handful of grated parmesan that DiFara throws over the pizza right when it comes out of the oven, before he cuts fresh basil with scissors onto the steaming, glorious pie. Yes. The end result is delicious - fresh, made just for you, cheesy and crispy but not heavy...we'll be back. When, I'm not sure, but I know we'll be back.

On Samson & Delilah: Indigeneity, Strength, and Community

This month, BAM screened an Australian film called "Samson & Delilah." Because E has automatic radar for anything Australian that comes through NYC, he knew about it, and we went to see this incredible film. It is spellbinding, difficult, and worth the struggle.

Samson and Delilah movie trailer HD from Trinity Films on Vimeo.

Samson & Delilah are two Aboriginal teenagers in a devastated indigenous community outside Alice Springs, Australia. Struggling with family, being a teenager, and negotiating their identities, events transpire that lead them to leave their community and go to the city, Alice Springs. Once there, they are homeless, and unable to understand or negotiate the ways of Australian city life. Delilah undergoes horrifying treatment, and in the end, they leave Alice Springs and go to her family's land, "her country." The tale is heartbreaking, especially because - as we learn only halfway through the film - Samson has a speech deficiency and much of the communication between the two teens is nonverbal. The filmmakers deftly highlight the nuances of nonverbal communication, whether it is Delilah's grandmother's hysterical responses to Samson, or Delilah's own physical reactions to the events that happen to her.

Warwick Thornton, the director, is from Alice Springs and shared in a Q & A after the movie that he felt an obligation to share the struggles of his local community, not to publicize them and cause shame, but just to be able to discuss them openly. For Thornton, film is a way to create community. The filmmakers had a premiere on a football field and bussed in people living in communities outside Alice Springs, feeding them and encouraging them to comment on the film afterwards. Thus, film becomes a way of enacting and living social responsibility, connecting communities, and opening dialogue about the ways that communities can effectively reach out to those struggling within them. Thornton commented that these teens' situation was local, but also global: "There are Samsons and Delilahs on the corners of Brooklyn. Do we notice?" He emphasized the importance of showing kindness and being open, as a community, to the struggles of people that are often marginalized because of how "we" (and here, yes, I am normalizing) perceive them. We see poverty, dirt, prostitution, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse - not people, like us, in trouble.

Thornton also commented on the title of his film, saying that he had long ascribed the name "Samson" to the male protagonist but had not named the girl. He chose Delilah (or, rather, his wife did...) because of its irony - in this film, Delilah makes Samson stronger, rather than the Biblical story wherein Delilah weakens Samson, stealing his strength. Thornton said that he did this purposefully, to showcase the strength of native women - how they often carry their communities on their backs, building them - and rarely get the credit.

As we walked out, E and my amazing friend Norah were silent. I wanted to be able to have words, but I didn't. The film had stunned us. E commented later that the movie made him want to get more involved in our community (later events in the Southwest further reinforced this desire). Norah noted to me recently, three weeks after the screening, that the movie was still with her.

I am reminded of a story in Paul Rogat Loeb's amazing book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While." In it, Danusha Veronica Goska writes in her essay, "Political Paralysis," about the importance of using the power we have. She writes that we may never know how the small powers we have may change the lives of those around us, if we but exercise them. This movie has inspired me - and I daresay most who see it - to examine their social responsibility - to use the powers we have, whether it is voting, recycling, riding a bike or taking public transportation to reduce the carbon footprint, to feeding the hungry...there are so many ways to make a difference in the world. We cannot expect to change the world through inaction - we must start, even if it feels small, to make some contribution to our communities. We never know where the ripple will end up...and that is the beauty of the thing, that change is electrifying, like a current, like a ripple. Every day is a choice.

To find out when and where the movie is screening near you, check out the film's website here.

On Bullying, Contested Bodies and Marking Difference

Bullying has been much in the news lately, unfortunately. The recent suicides of young students has drawn attention to the dramatic and detestable negative powers of bullies. Many more eloquent than I have commented on this, and expressed many of my sentiments. Notably too Dan Savage has created the It Gets Better Project, as a way to reach out to those who feel marked by their difference and ridiculed for it. Again, I have little to add to those who have already spoken about their sadness, their desire to support those who get bullied and to sit in solidarity with them, and to those who demand this kind of behavior STOP. Immediately.

I went to a talk at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute last week. It was a debate between reputed scholars Saba Mahmood and Joan Scott on secularism, religious liberty, and sex. Mahmood, who you should definitely read if you haven't, argued in her critical work The Politics of Piety that resistance is not the only form of agency. Intervening in scholarly traditions that have painted a person's agency or self-articulation as either succumbing to dominant, normalizing forces versus resisting them, Mahmood argues that this is a simplistic and non-useful way to look at the way agency works. In this talk, Mahmood discussed how often times, discussions of secularism locate themselves on gendered bodies. In plain talk, discussions of the "secular state" versus "freedom of religious expression" show up in fights over abortion, gay marriage, women's reproductive rights, etc. We do not see examples of straight men's bodies, and these mens' control over their own bodies - these discussions don't come up. These bodies are all gendered or non-hetero-male bodies, and control over them becomes an issue: does the government get the final say, or does the religious community? In this formulation, however, women's bodies and those practicing non-heterosexual behaviors are defined as "opposite" the norm - and straight men become the norm. It is precisely this kind of thinking, which manifests itself in othering behavior, that has so insidiously reared its ugly head in the bullying.

How can we accept difference, and hold a community of various different practices, without the fear of that difference? I would call for tolerance, but after reading Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, I can no longer advocate for tolerance. I advocate a space where all identities can be respected and shared, even and especially when they conflict. Even in New York, though, a city full of different identities and traditions, I have found troubling encounters with difference. Two nights ago, I got on the R train coming home from the gym after work. The train was full of commuters, so I boarded the train in a crush of people. After I sat down, I looked around and surveyed the car. I didn't immediately notice anything noteworthy, but then I saw a large black lump sitting in the seat across and diagonally from me. It is fairly common to see women wearing hijab or Hasidic dress, but I have never before seen a woman (and here, I am presuming this person was a woman) wearing a full burqa, with a mesh covering over the eyes, either here or in Syria or Tunisia. She wore a full black chador, with a cape covering her form so that I couldn't see her arms, and she had her purse and bags under her cloak. I felt guilty, after all my training in Middle East Studies, that she had been so invisible to me, and that I was so highly aware of her difference. Ashamed of looking at her more than I looked at the other passengers, I tried not to look at her (although I have problems with this, too - I was avoiding her more than I did anyone else on the train, thus treating her differently, further marking her difference). I began to be aware of others' reactions to her, people doing double-takes and staring openly. I wondered if she felt uncomfortable with the attention she garnered; I wondered if she was used to it or liked the extra attention. It has been argued that some Muslims have begun to dress more conservatively, and more "Islamically" (problematic, another post) post 9/11 to assert their identity (ies) in the face of anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior. I wondered if she rode the train often. These thoughts felt distressing - I was imagining her personality because of her dress, defining her on one expression (perhaps chosen, perhaps not) of an identity. I was not seeing her as a whole person. I was essentializing her, and in wondering whether she took the train, I was falling pretty to the idea that the woman in the veil must not know where she's going nor how to negotiate South Brooklyn geography or society. I admit this not because I am proud of it, but because I am deeply ashamed, that after my academic training and after my time in the Middle East, I'd still catch myself thinking this way. It troubles me, because I know better. Period. And I am always frustrated when I play the role of cultural ambassador, advocating for respect and understanding towards Middle Eastern cultures to my fellow Americans who don't know as much about the region as I do, who have never been, who haven't studied Arabic, whose questions make me sad about the lack of knowledge about the world in general and the Middle East in particular. How, then, can I judge these others for mistakes I still myself commit, for ignorance I fall back on when confronted with something, or someone, outside my comfort zone?

In watching the other passengers negotiate this woman's presence, I saw some passengers got up and moved to other seats, or passed through the car, tripping on other passengers, as they stared at her. It was an uncomfortable ride, not just because of the MTA's orange plastic seats, but because of the social norms, fear, and tensions that were laid bare. I was uncomfortable with myself, for my marking of this woman's difference, for my reaction, for my lack of being as postcolonial/evolved/understanding/generous as I'd like to be. I did not bully this woman, but I did mark her as different with my behavior, just like everyone else on the train. So I am led to wonder, what can I/we learn from this profound discomfort? Is this discomfort an integral part of accepting an increasingly interconnected world community wherein each person carries many identities that articulate themselves across and into other identities, challenging our easy assumptions about people, the world, the way things are? Perhaps, like adolescence, this strange in-between-ness means that is fertile ground, that there is a space of transitioning, and if we can learn to accept that things are not always the way we imagine them to be, we can see more fully the world around us, holding our experiences with dignity, and without judgment. And that starts with me. I can't control the behavior of others, but I can work on my own.

I realize this little post will not convince swarms of people to change their behavior, especially since someone far more famous asked the same question I am posing many years ago. In honor of John Lennon's 70th birthday, I will end this post by asking you to:

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world


PS: Another great book on difference and the modern era is Rabbi Jonathan Sack's The Dignity of Difference.